Albatron PX865PE Pro II Mobo - Albatron PX865PE Pro II Mobo
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The Northbridge Cooler
Being the cooling freak that I am, good cooling is a must on motherboard chipsets. Not only did Albatron choose to go with active cooling, the heatsink they used was pure copper! How freakin awesome is that?! To further make the PX865PE ProII stand out, Albatron combined it with a blue LED fan to match the nice blue pcb.
Albatron used thermal pad for thermal interface between the heatsink and the northbridge. After removing the heatsink, it could be seen that the thermal pad gave good contact.
Bios
Albatron chose the Phoenix Bios as their main bios. The screens and selections look like that of Asus motherboards. The bios gives good selection for overclocking and tweaking. Although Abit is known for having their great SoftMenu III, Albatron's section for overclocking comes rather close. It is easy and user friendly. Everything could be found in one section.
It starts off with the Boot Sequence, and like every bios, it gives choices for first, second, and third boot devices. Next is the Advanced Bios Features which gives the user a choice to turn on or off Hyper Threading (for supported CPUs). The timings for memory could be found under Advanced Chipset Features.
Here are the settings available:
CAS Latency: 2 - 2.5 - 3
Active to Precharge Delay: 5 - 6 - 7 - 8
RAS to CAS Delay: 2 - 3 - 4
RAS Precharge: 2 - 3 - 4
OC Dram Stability: Standard - Optimal (an option only available in the new beta bios)
The FSB, Vcore, Vdimm, AGP voltage, Memory dividers, and PCI clocks could be found all in one place under Frequencey Voltage Control.
Here are the settings available:
Spread Spectrum: Enabled/Disabled
FSB clock: 200 - 333
AGP/PCI/SCR bus: wide range including AUTO/AUTO/AUTO
AGP voltage: 1.5 - 1.8
DDR voltage: 2.55 - 2.85
memory ratios
Now here is the interesting part. The CPU voltage sure has a wide range of choices, but certainly no the greatest. Don't understand what I'm saying? Check out the screenshot and see for yourself.
It starts off with 1.1 to default voltage of 1.525 and goes up to 1.6. That's where it tops off and becomes funky. The next few selections starts from 0.850 and ends at 1.5875. Once again, it stats below 1.0, ranging from 0.8375 to 1.0875. Albatron seriously needs to work with CPU voltage selections. Having a max of 1.6v is definitely on the weak side for serious overclocking. Albatron engineers better hurry with their new bios update to get a fix on this. It's a turn-off. At first I thought this was a problem only with the beta bios; so I switched back to the original production bios and still gave me same results. What a bummer. It doesn't seem like everything is going well anymore.
Installation
Installing the motherboard was simple and painless. One main thing I have to note is the way Albatron uses their pins for Power LED. Instead of the usual 3 pins, Albatron only has two. From what I have worked with, all cases have Power LED that fits into 3 pins--one charge, one blank, and one ground. Take a look at the pictures and you'll see what I mean. I had to make a simple adjustment in order for it to match Albatron's "different" arrangement.
Above shows the placement for LED connectors and the adjustment I made. I had to cut my original Power LED into two pieces so that each can go into its designated pin. This has happened before with my Albatron KX400+ Pro. One thing that I find strange is that the Albatron PX865PE Pro doesn't have this problem. Why Albatron does this to their top of the line board just confuses me.
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Test Setup:
Intel Pentium 4 2.4C
Abit IS7 w/ Bios13 (memory performance set to AUTO/AUTO)
Albatron PX865PE ProII w/ Beta Bios
2 x 256mb PC3000 Kingston HyperX (set for all tests at 2-3-3-6)
Sapphire Radeon 9500 -> 9700pro speeds (275/270 -> 320/310) with Omega 2.4.43 drivers based on ATI's Catalyst 3.4
Maxtor 80gb ATA133 8mb cache @ 7200rpm
Swiftech MCX4000 w/ 92mm Vantec Tornado
Pioneer 16x DVD Slot Load
Vantec 420w power supply
Antec Full Tower
Overclocking
Before we head on to the benchmarks to see the capabilities of this board, I have to cover the overclocking section first in order for anyone to understand what the benchmark results mean. This board starts out with some problems that just cry out for help from a new bios update. But so far it isn't all that bad.
Since the board claims that it is able to run at 1.2ghz FSB, I decided to give it a try. Instead of the usual overclocking procedure of upping the FSB by increments, I booted the board at 300FSB on my first try. Unfortunately, I was greeted with a beeping error and the Voice Genie came on. I know my 2.4C is capable of doing 300FSB because I was able to reach that speed on my ABIT IS7, so I knew my limitations were not my CPU and ram. The maximum stable overclock I was able to achieve was 285FSB. Don't think of this as a disappoint but rather a great surprise. What do I mean? If you recall the CPU voltage options, highest attained Vcore was only 1.6v. I was only able to run my 2.4C at 300FSB on my IS7 with 1.75v. Thus, achieving a stable 285FSB with a 1.6Vcore setting was a great success.
Overclocking the FSB was not so easy. The first thing I proceeded to do was lock the AGP/PCI/SCR busses to 66/33/100. This displayed instability also. I could overclock no higher than 205FSB! Then Justi gave me a good tip to set it to AUTO/AUTO/AUTO and see what kind of results I get. To my surprise, I reached a high 290FSB, but that wasn't stable. I backed it down to 285FSB and reached stability. Then I headed over to overclock my video card to start producing benchmark results. This proved to be unstable either. What could be the problem? I was able to benchmark all games and applications without a hiccup at 285FSB but overclocking the video card gave me frozen screens. It can only be that the AGP bus is too highl! So I calculated myself what the AGP bus would be at with the 1/6 divider and it showed 97mhz! No wonder the video card wouldn't overclock. I then began another journey to see how high the video card would overclock on such high bus. The attempt was a failure. Every single setting I tried would just freeze the screens or cause corruptions to images. I simply could not get it to overclock any further. Since my calculations of the AGP bus was so high, I rebooted and went into bios and set the AGP/PCI/SCR busses to 66/33/AUTO. With this setting I was still able to overclock to 285FSB. This just shows that the bus speed of SCR is giving problems if not set to AUTO. I then tried to overclock the video card once more, but this also proved fruitless. The AGP locked at 66 failed to work. I went into SiSoft Sandra trying to look for the AGP information but with the new version of Sandra, I could find no such information. All in all, this just shows that Albatron is having problems with their AGP/PCI/SCR bus settings.
Finally done with my overclocking venture, I have included benchmarks for the following settings on the Albatron PX865PE ProII:
Stock FSB with Stock Video Speeds (STOCK)
Stock FSB with Overclocked Video Speeds (9700pro)
Overclocked FSB with Stock Video Speeds (FSB)
The code names in parentheses will be used to differentiate the performance in the graph charts.
Benchmarks
3DMark2k1se Build330
3DMark2k3 w/ patch
PCMark2k2
Code Creatures
Commanche 4 Demo Benchmark
Aquamark v2.3
SiSoft Sandra
Finally, we have the numbers...
3DMark2K1SE Build 330
From the obtained numbers, we can see that 3DMark2k1se loves high FSB. A higher score could be obtained with higher FSB rather than video card overclock. One thing to note here is that the Abit IS7 engineers have "unlocked" the memory performance on their Springdale boards giving them an extra edge to achieve better performance.
3DMark2k3 w/ patch
It looks like Futuremark has made a benchmark that truly calculates the performance of the video card. Unlike its earlier edition, higher FSB doesn't mean higher score.
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Benchmarks Continued
PCMark2k2
Finally we have something that shows similar results. The CPU scores in PCMark2k2 come to be about the same. ABIT leads slightly due to its maximum overclock of 3.6ghz while Albatron is topping out at 3.42ghz. Memory scores are what sets them apart. Once again IS7's memory enhancement, although set to AUTO/AUTO, destroys that of Albatron's. They really need to "unlock" this performance. The HD scores pretty much remain the same.
Commanche 4
All of them have about the same performance. The only exception would be IS7 running full speed with the memory enhancement.
Aquamark
Looks like Aquamark is somewhat similar to Futuremark's 3DMark2k1se. It just loves higher FSB and higher memory speeds.
SiSoft Sandra
CPU scores remain relative to the speeds obtained. The ABIT scoring higher simply because it was able to overclock higher. The CPU Multimedia test is another CPU benchmark and also shows that the performance of the two is on par. Memory scores are where the two boards separate. Because of ABIT's memory enhancements, it was able to outscore Albatron by 800 points or more! Albatron, are you getting the hint yet?
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